by Topher Ryals

Author: Topher

2017 has been a tough year, for a lot of reasons that don’t need to be rehashed here. On the flip side of that toughness, though, is one of the best years I can ever remember for movies and video games. Over the past 11 months, there have been two new entries on my all-time favorites lists for movies and video games* with other possibilities still on the way.

*These lists do not actually exist in any fixed form. Maybe I’ll write them up soon.

If you’re among the ones of readers I have for this blog, you may have noticed I took last week off. After a long, sleep deprived weekend in Austin for the Austin Film Festival and Conference, I needed a break. It was nice to not worry about what I was going to post on here for a few days, even if I was sick the whole time. I’m still sick, by the way.

Moving forward, I’m going to be putting a little less time into blogging and more into my creative writing. Posts here are still going to be (fairly) regular, but they’re not going to be daily. I’m thinking it’ll be in the two to three times a week range, but I’m not promising anything.

That’s not quite true. I am promising I’ll be posting some bits and pieces of whatever creative work I end up doing, and I’ll be posting any short stories I write in their entirety for the foreseeable future.

That’s enough housekeeping. Let’s get to the entertainment I’ve been spending my time with.

I saw Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut, Lady Bird, last night. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I wasn’t just watching a movie, and I wasn’t just watching a movie I enjoyed—I was watching one of my favorite movies ever.

I’m not going to be writing reviews anymore. Not formal, analyze every aspect of a piece of media and throw a rating on it reviews, anyway. I’ve been moving in this direction anyway, but it’s time to make the call and make it official.

I love movies. I love video games. I love TV (when I actually get around to watching it). I’m going to focus my writing on those topics on that love more often than not. I’m not saying I’m only going to say good things or I’m only going to write about things I like, but there’s something to be said for reacting to something, to anything, emotionally and leaving it at that.

There’s a place for the technical, detail-oriented discussion, but I’m realizing that place just isn’t for me. Maybe what I’m writing could still be considered reviews. Maybe it would still be possible to slap a score on them and call it a day. To be honest, I don’t really care about that.

Movies, games, and TV (not to mention everything else) would be nothing without emotional impact. I’m going to see and play things, and I’m going to have reactions to them. I’m going to try to capture those reactions, those raw emotions, as often as I can. I’m going to try to focus my writing on here on those emotions, and on the works that really draw those emotions out of me.

Assuming my non-revenue pass is actual able to get me to Austin, I’ll be at the Austin Film Festival this weekend. Most of my time will be spent at panels, showcases, and more parties than this antisocial guy usually goes to in a lifetime crammed into four days. But this is still a film festival, so I’m going to try my best to see some movies.

Traveling is great. Going new places, having new experiences, getting out of your comfort zone. Traveling is also terrible, for pretty much every other reason out there. That’s why proper pre-travel planning is incredibly important. Not flights, hotels, and ground transportation. All of these are important parts of planning for any trip, but they’re not important. They make travel possible, but they don’t make it bearable.

Travel, like so much in life, comes down to a single question: How will I keep myself entertained?

Stranger Things seemed to capture lightning in a bottle when it debuted on Netflix last summer. It brought influences from some of the best horror and mystery stories out there, but it managed to do so without feeling like a lesser, derivative work. It captured a moment in time for its characters, and its atmosphere deserved as much attention as those characters and their journeys.

The reviews are rolling in, and it looks like season two does it all over again, possibly even better than the first season. It’s not all good news though: I won’t be able to watch it this weekend.

I spent the entirety of this past weekend driving to, hanging out in, and driving back from Vermont with my wife and dog. Nature’s really beautiful sometimes, but it’s just not the same as staring at a screen for an extended period. Good thing I still found some time to do that.

Here’s everything I watched and played this weekend (including an incredibly enjoyable second time watching Wonder Woman, this time at home in glorious 4K):

I, like many others, decided to give MoviePass a shot when its price dropped to the surprisingly low $9.95 a month. It was a great deal. So great I just couldn’t pass it up. So great the company was bombarded by people trying to sign up and the site wasn’t accessible. I gave up on trying to get things to work right away, but I eventually signed up on September 5. I’d planned on trying things out for a month and writing a review/summary of my experience with it.

MoviePass had something else on its mind, and I still don’t even have my card. Let’s take a look at what exactly has happened:

Sometimes I just can’t help myself. My worst habit as a writer is rarely focusing on a single project until it’s completed—and I don’t just mean blogging five days a week on top of creative writing. I’m currently doing work, in at least a small capacity, on three different screenplays. One of these is a rewrite of something I wrote earlier this year, and the other two are in the outline stage with (foolish) hopes of writing both before the end of the year.